Plato was an Athenian philosopher, who founded the first academic institution in the western world, the academy and is well-known for paving the path for philosophy in western traditions. He was a student of Socrates’ and often used Socrates in the discussions of his dialogues, the myth of the cave being one of them. Plato was a believer of idealism. He believed that immaterial qualities are more real than empirical objects, which we can feel, see, and touch. In the myth of the cave, Plato paints us a picture of how we can be easily fooled by our senses, and of our original perceptions of the world.
In Plato’s The Apology, he arises a standpoint about death. He thinks that death is not what people usually think as a horrible, unacceptable thing. Instead, death can be a blessing. In order to support his viewpoint, he also has two concrete reasons that explain the advantages of death explicitly. The first one states that death is like a dreamless sleep for it is complete lack of perception, and then death would be a great advantage.
Plato believes that there are three main classes of ideal human society. A person should belong to one of these three classes, and the division of people is depended on natural factors. If every individual performs his or her duties, that is, producers, auxiliaries, and guardians fulfill their respective obligations in the states and do not interfere with each other, would be justice, and render the country become a just state. The city is just due to people in three class performed their function, and make the states brave, wise, and temperate because of some other emotions and hobbies of these three classes. Plato thinks there are three qualities in the human soul, namely the rational, the passion, and the concupiscent.
Within the greater work, The Trial and Death of Socrates, Plato identifies fault in the current definition and implementation of Justice when his teacher faces punishment for helping Athens. Silencing Socrates will only make Athens suffer, and Justice must derive from reason. The outcome represents the juror’s lack of understanding, or simple overlooking, of absolute Justice as a direct product of the democratic structure. If not a democracy, the Athenian people would fall more in order with their role in the Whole and would ultimately be more successful. Plato argues Socrates prodes at Athenians to help them, and their conviction against him was due to a personal choice, and thus they fail to work together as a perfect society.
Different from Aristotle, Plato defines love as “possessing the good self eternally”. Aristotle focuses more on one’s desire/ mindset towards a relationship while Plato focuses more on the foundation of love. Plato believes that love should not be established on outer beauty but inner beauty. Also, we should look for “immortality” in love. It is interesting that Plato portrays the relationship between men only, but not the typical relationship between men and women.
Before modern philosophy, Plato wrote numerous important philosophical works during his lifetime, but some of the more important ones are his works involving Socrates. With these works, Plato touched upon important beliefs that seem clear-cut to us, but are much more complicated than believed. One of these beliefs involves the meaning and importance of knowledge. The topic of knowledge is important in his works Protagoras, Euthydemus, and Meno. There are three points he brings up involving proper knowledge: the importance of good teaching, the necessity of knowledge to do what is best in the world, and how virtue is a type of knowledge.
Knowledge already exists inside a soul, but it is crucial that this knowledge be pointed toward the good in order to benefit future rulers. Plato states that the men stuck inside the cave of only sensory perception are not ‘obliged to share in the toils of politics.’ They have grown up in the dark so it is the only lifestyle they know. It is understandable that they would not show any gratitude to the men who have seen the light. Nevertheless, these men who have gained that knowledge through philosophical reasoning must try and save those in the darkness, no matter the lack of appreciativeness. Plato writes that past rulers must make life better for their successors in
2. The intelligible world (the world of Forms) that gives the visible world it’s being.” (16) He believed that the soul exists without the body, and that we obtain wisdom from our thoughts and therefore we inherit this at the start of conception. Plato thinking were based on the divine being, who he believes made us, and the objects of the world. He believed, the soul was already formed, as what we see here on earth is just a reflection of what is already made. While Aristotle, did not believe Plato’s thinking of the Forms, his thinking was that the soul is not made of a form of objects that that’s on the shape of a material thing, but consists of the same higher substance or spiritual being in his metaphysics theological thinking.
Plato had views to how to live a good life should be, towards what end the individual should act in accordance with their ideas of good life. Furthermore he thought of the world in a more theoretical insightful way theory of forms. Plato believed that a soul transmigrated until it was able to free itself from physical form and returned to the a realm without form. Plato also taught that true knowledge came from the soul and reason which would make him a rationalist and he believed that things like beauty and good in the physical world were glimmers of reality. Aristotle theory of forms with its two separate realms failed to explain what it was meant to explain.
Explain Plato’s theory of forms. What is the function of the forms in relation to platonic metaphysics? What is the relation between the sensible and the intelligible? To begin I would like to firstly establish Plato’s theory of forms, which, is inextricably linked with his metaphysical theory and Platonic Dualism, (intelligible world and sensible world). Plato can be regarded as the first ever Metaphysician, as Plato is searching for the true nature of being, and believed that the world in which we live, which is the world interpreted through the senses (the material world), that is forever changing, is just an imitation of the true world, the world of ideas, that is eternal unchanging and immaterial.